Academic literature on the topic 'Multi-ethnic orchestra'

The research presented here is based on studies of the sociology of music, as well as on analyses of the dynamics of immigration. This explored some of the social dynamics and actions of a multi-ethnic orchestra founded and operating in Rome. The purpose of the study was to examine this orchestra as an example of good practice regarding intercultural integration and was the criterion by which we chose to analyse the Orchestra di Piazza Vittorio, founded in 2002 by Mario Tronco in one of Rome’s central multi-ethnic districts, the Esquiline. The question posed here is whether the creation of a multi-ethnic orchestra can act as an alternative model which, by means of the socialisation process, redefines and rediscovers the age-old relational and integrating functions of music, availing of the collective memory, identity, heritage and varieties of music, without forfeiting its own identity.

Репрезентовано динаміку поширення товариського руху у Станіславові (нині Івано-Франківську) в контексті поліетнічного середовища міста другої пол. ХІХ – першої третини ХХ ст. Досліджено практику низки українських, польських, єврейських громадсько-просвітницьких товариств, серед яких «Просвіта», «Рідна школа», «Руська Бесіда», «Союз українок», «Каменярі», «Фрогсін», «Гаскала», «Лютня», «Гармонія клейова» та інших, які виявилися активними комунікаторами у музично-мистецькій сфері. Охарактеризовано широкий спектр діяльності цих організацій в таких аспектах: заснування хорів, оркестрів, аматорських театральних гуртків; навчання диригентів для гуртків; відкриття освітніх курсів для режисерів і диригентів; влаштування драматичних вистав і концертів; організація конкурсів драматичних гуртків та хорів; відкриття навчальних закладів різного рівня і напрямів діяльності; проведення різнопланових лекцій і семінарів; започаткування бібліотек з музичною і драматичною літературою тощо. Ключові слова: товариство, культурно-мистецька комунікація, поліетнічне середовище, Станіславів. The article presents the dynamics of social movement in Stanislaviv (now Ivano-Frankivsk) in the context of the multi-ethnic environment of the city in the second half of the ХІХ th – the first third of the ХХ th centuries. The practice of numbers of Ukrainian, Polish, Jewish public-educational associations, including «Enlightenment», «Native School», «Russian Conversation», «Union of Ukrainians», «Kamenari», «Frogsin», «Gaskala», «Lyutnya», «Glue Harmony» and others who have proven to be active communicators in the music and arts field. A wide range of activities of these organizations is described in the following aspects: foundation of choirs, orchestras, amateur theater groups; training of conductors for circles; opening educational courses for directors and conductors; arranging dramatic performances and concerts; organization of competitions for drama groups and choirs; opening of educational establishments of different level and directions of activity; conducting various lectures and seminars; setting up libraries with music and drama literature and more. Key words: society, cultural and artistic communication, multiethnic environment, Stanislaviv.

Background. Turning to the original sources of Ukrainian musical culture, we should point out the greatest achievements that appear to be the folk-song tradition. The problem of authorship of musical folklore was not considered for well-known reasons: its decisive features are oral, anonymous, collective way of creation. If the phenomenon of authorship is present in various manifestations of musical creativity (composing, performing, directing, etc.) and works in various forms of musical art of the past and present, today the study of the role of the singer as a co-author in the contemporary representation of Ukrainian folk song has not yet become a subject of a special scientific interest. The stated problem opens the prospect of developing the interpretation science as a science of the phenomenology of the artist’s creative personality in various artistic discourses. The urgency of the topic is to study the peculiarities of the representation of Ukrainian folk songs in the contemporary concert repertoire on the example of the activities of the iconic representatives of the national culture: Kvitka (Kacey) Cisyk, Nina Matvienko, and Taras Kompanichenko. Objectives. The purpose of the research is to substantiate the role of the singer as the co-author in representing the Ukrainian folk song in the contemporary concert and artistic space on examples of multi-genre patterns (folk song, song-romance, spiritual chants). Methods. The methodology of the research is based on the genre, structurally functional and interpretive scientific approaches. Results. In order to highlight the peculiarities of the representation of Ukrainian folk songs in the concert and artistic space of today, within the framework of the scientific article, let us dwell on the consideration of the following genres of folk song: folk song, song-romance, and chant. In the unique performance by Kvitka Cisyk (1953–1998) of the chosen folk song “Verse, my verse” the singer appears as the co-author of the song. As one knows, this folk song has no authorship (being an example of the collective folk-song tradition). The level of co-authorship of the singer can be defined as the one corresponding to the traditional performance (the performer as the author). Another example considered is G. Skovoroda’s “Every City Should Have Its Character and Rights” in two versions (N. Matvienko and T. Kompanichenko) and two genre dimensions. Thus, in the detailed analysis of the sample, it can be argued that in the performance of N. Matvienko it sounds like a song-romance, and T. Kompanichenko’s interpretation makes clearer its genre attribution as a spiritual chant (the ethical basis). The song-romance performed by N. Matvienko appears as a bright theatrical performance. The singer represents the song in an elegant manner, appealing to the style basics of the musical baroque. In the instrumental accompaniment of the Ensemble of Ancient Music of K. Chechenia (Konstantin Chechenia), the baroque sound-ideal of the court secular culture was embodied. N. Matvienko, as the co-author of this composition, refined the baroque sounding (the deep understanding of the verbal text by G. Skovoroda, organic in the embodiment of the aesthetic and musically-immanent principles of the baroque style). “Every City Should Have Its Character and Rights” performed by T. Kompanichenko is characterized by such features as: 1) the introvert nature of the expression as a notable feature of the kobza-lyre tradition; 2) the interpretation by the performer of the “Skovoroda” song as an example of the spiritual chant (the correspondence of the repertoire of the traditional singing); 3) the organic and indissoluble nature of the vocal and instrumental components (singing performance (spivogra) as an attributive quality of the kobza-lyre tradition). Conclusions. The role of K. Cisyk as the co-author of the folk song “Verse, my verse” is evidenced in the fact that the singer managed to reach the level of the standard of interpretation of Lemko folk song, as much as possible tending to perform the song without any change. The subtle feeling of Ukrainian melody with the introduction of the contemporary sound (the high artistic orchestral arrangements by J. Cortner) is stated as a manifestation of the national sound ideal (according to O. Bench). In N. Matvienko’s performing interpretation of the song-romance “Every City Should Have Its Character and Rights” in the framework of the modern concert stage (with the sound of timbres of unique Ukrainian baroque musical instruments), the national baroque style constants (the concept of “the world as a theatre”) became more visible. The performing interpretation by T. Kompanichenko is aimed at the completeness of the disclosure of the concept of the composition as an ideological and aesthetic orientation of the kobza-lyre tradition. Without violating its style basics, the singer, as the co-author of the composition performed, appears to be the driving force behind the enrichment and development of the established stylistic principles of the kobza-lyre tradition. The provided multi-genre samples performed by the iconic representatives of the national culture are based on the established tradition of folk song and express the integrity of the creative personality of the performers as bearers of the spiritual tradition of ethnic culture. The prospects for further research in this direction may be related to the study of the iconic phenomena of the performing music culture of Ukraine, which find an appeal in the socio-cultural and research space of today

By the time you read this, it will be wrong. Things seemed to be moving so fast in these first days after airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the Pennsylvania earth. Each certainty is as carelessly dropped as it was once carelessly assumed. The sounds of lower Manhattan that used to serve as white noise for residents—sirens, screeches, screams—are no longer signs without a referent. Instead, they make folks stare and stop, hurry and hustle, wondering whether the noises we know so well are in fact, this time, coefficients of a new reality. At the time of writing, the events themselves are also signs without referents—there has been no direct claim of responsibility, and little proof offered by accusers since the 11th. But it has been assumed that there is a link to US foreign policy, its military and economic presence in the Arab world, and opposition to it that seeks revenge. In the intervening weeks the US media and the war planners have supplied their own narrow frameworks, making New York’s “ground zero” into the starting point for a new escalation of global violence. We want to write here about the combination of sources and sensations that came that day, and the jumble of knowledges and emotions that filled our minds. Working late the night before, Toby was awoken in the morning by one of the planes right overhead. That happens sometimes. I have long expected a crash when I’ve heard the roar of jet engines so close—but I didn’t this time. Often when that sound hits me, I get up and go for a run down by the water, just near Wall Street. Something kept me back that day. Instead, I headed for my laptop. Because I cannot rely on local media to tell me very much about the role of the US in world affairs, I was reading the British newspaper The Guardian on-line when it flashed a two-line report about the planes. I looked up at the calendar above my desk to see whether it was April 1st. Truly. Then I got off-line and turned on the TV to watch CNN. That second, the phone rang. My quasi-ex-girlfriend I’m still in love with called from the mid-West. She was due to leave that day for the Bay Area. Was I alright? We spoke for a bit. She said my cell phone was out, and indeed it was for the remainder of the day. As I hung up from her, my friend Ana rang, tearful and concerned. Her husband, Patrick, had left an hour before for work in New Jersey, and it seemed like a dangerous separation. All separations were potentially fatal that day. You wanted to know where everyone was, every minute. She told me she had been trying to contact Palestinian friends who worked and attended school near the event—their ethnic, religious, and national backgrounds made for real poignancy, as we both thought of the prejudice they would (probably) face, regardless of the eventual who/what/when/where/how of these events. We agreed to meet at Bruno’s, a bakery on La Guardia Place. For some reason I really took my time, though, before getting to Ana. I shampooed and shaved under the shower. This was a horror, and I needed to look my best, even as men and women were losing and risking their lives. I can only interpret what I did as an attempt to impose normalcy and control on the situation, on my environment. When I finally made it down there, she’d located our friends. They were safe. We stood in the street and watched the Towers. Horrified by the sight of human beings tumbling to their deaths, we turned to buy a tea/coffee—again some ludicrous normalization—but were drawn back by chilling screams from the street. Racing outside, we saw the second Tower collapse, and clutched at each other. People were streaming towards us from further downtown. We decided to be with our Palestinian friends in their apartment. When we arrived, we learnt that Mark had been four minutes away from the WTC when the first plane hit. I tried to call my daughter in London and my father in Canberra, but to no avail. I rang the mid-West, and asked my maybe-former novia to call England and Australia to report in on me. Our friend Jenine got through to relatives on the West Bank. Israeli tanks had commenced a bombardment there, right after the planes had struck New York. Family members spoke to her from under the kitchen table, where they were taking refuge from the shelling of their house. Then we gave ourselves over to television, like so many others around the world, even though these events were happening only a mile away. We wanted to hear official word, but there was just a huge absence—Bush was busy learning to read in Florida, then leading from the front in Louisiana and Nebraska. As the day wore on, we split up and regrouped, meeting folks. One guy was in the subway when smoke filled the car. Noone could breathe properly, people were screaming, and his only thought was for his dog DeNiro back in Brooklyn. From the panic of the train, he managed to call his mom on a cell to ask her to feed “DeNiro” that night, because it looked like he wouldn’t get home. A pregnant woman feared for her unborn as she fled the blasts, pushing the stroller with her baby in it as she did so. Away from these heart-rending tales from strangers, there was the fear: good grief, what horrible price would the US Government extract for this, and who would be the overt and covert agents and targets of that suffering? What blood-lust would this generate? What would be the pattern of retaliation and counter-retaliation? What would become of civil rights and cultural inclusiveness? So a jumble of emotions came forward, I assume in all of us. Anger was not there for me, just intense sorrow, shock, and fear, and the desire for intimacy. Network television appeared to offer me that, but in an ultimately unsatisfactory way. For I think I saw the end-result of reality TV that day. I have since decided to call this ‘emotionalization’—network TV’s tendency to substitute analysis of US politics and economics with a stress on feelings. Of course, powerful emotions have been engaged by this horror, and there is value in addressing that fact and letting out the pain. I certainly needed to do so. But on that day and subsequent ones, I looked to the networks, traditional sources of current-affairs knowledge, for just that—informed, multi-perspectival journalism that would allow me to make sense of my feelings, and come to a just and reasoned decision about how the US should respond. I waited in vain. No such commentary came forward. Just a lot of asinine inquiries from reporters that were identical to those they pose to basketballers after a game: Question—‘How do you feel now?’ Answer—‘God was with me today.’ For the networks were insistent on asking everyone in sight how they felt about the end of las torres gemelas. In this case, we heard the feelings of survivors, firefighters, viewers, media mavens, Republican and Democrat hacks, and vacuous Beltway state-of-the-nation pundits. But learning of the military-political economy, global inequality, and ideologies and organizations that made for our grief and loss—for that, there was no space. TV had forgotten how to do it. My principal feeling soon became one of frustration. So I headed back to where I began the day—The Guardian web site, where I was given insightful analysis of the messy factors of history, religion, economics, and politics that had created this situation. As I dealt with the tragedy of folks whose lives had been so cruelly lost, I pondered what it would take for this to stop. Or whether this was just the beginning. I knew one thing—the answers wouldn’t come from mainstream US television, no matter how full of feelings it was. And that made Toby anxious. And afraid. He still is. And so the dreams come. In one, I am suddenly furloughed from my job with an orchestra, as audience numbers tumble. I make my evening-wear way to my locker along with the other players, emptying it of bubble gum and instrument. The next night, I see a gigantic, fifty-feet high wave heading for the city beach where I’ve come to swim. Somehow I am sheltered behind a huge wall, as all the people around me die. Dripping, I turn to find myself in a media-stereotype “crack house” of the early ’90s—desperate-looking black men, endless doorways, sudden police arrival, and my earnest search for a passport that will explain away my presence. I awake in horror, to the realization that the passport was already open and stamped—racialization at work for Toby, every day and in every way, as a white man in New York City. Ana’s husband, Patrick, was at work ten miles from Manhattan when “it” happened. In the hallway, I overheard some talk about two planes crashing, but went to teach anyway in my usual morning stupor. This was just the usual chatter of disaster junkies. I didn’t hear the words, “World Trade Center” until ten thirty, at the end of the class at the college I teach at in New Jersey, across the Hudson river. A friend and colleague walked in and told me the news of the attack, to which I replied “You must be fucking joking.” He was a little offended. Students were milling haphazardly on the campus in the late summer weather, some looking panicked like me. My first thought was of some general failure of the air-traffic control system. There must be planes falling out of the sky all over the country. Then the height of the towers: how far towards our apartment in Greenwich Village would the towers fall? Neither of us worked in the financial district a mile downtown, but was Ana safe? Where on the college campus could I see what was happening? I recognized the same physical sensation I had felt the morning after Hurricane Andrew in Miami seeing at a distance the wreckage of our shattered apartment across a suburban golf course strewn with debris and flattened power lines. Now I was trapped in the suburbs again at an unbridgeable distance from my wife and friends who were witnessing the attacks first hand. Were they safe? What on earth was going on? This feeling of being cut off, my path to the familiar places of home blocked, remained for weeks my dominant experience of the disaster. In my office, phone calls to the city didn’t work. There were six voice-mail messages from my teenaged brother Alex in small-town England giving a running commentary on the attack and its aftermath that he was witnessing live on television while I dutifully taught my writing class. “Hello, Patrick, where are you? Oh my god, another plane just hit the towers. Where are you?” The web was choked: no access to newspapers online. Email worked, but no one was wasting time writing. My office window looked out over a soccer field to the still woodlands of western New Jersey: behind me to the east the disaster must be unfolding. Finally I found a website with a live stream from ABC television, which I watched flickering and stilted on the tiny screen. It had all already happened: both towers already collapsed, the Pentagon attacked, another plane shot down over Pennsylvania, unconfirmed reports said, there were other hijacked aircraft still out there unaccounted for. Manhattan was sealed off. George Washington Bridge, Lincoln and Holland tunnels, all the bridges and tunnels from New Jersey I used to mock shut down. Police actions sealed off the highways into “the city.” The city I liked to think of as the capital of the world was cut off completely from the outside, suddenly vulnerable and under siege. There was no way to get home. The phone rang abruptly and Alex, three thousand miles away, told me he had spoken to Ana earlier and she was safe. After a dozen tries, I managed to get through and spoke to her, learning that she and Toby had seen people jumping and then the second tower fall. Other friends had been even closer. Everyone was safe, we thought. I sat for another couple of hours in my office uselessly. The news was incoherent, stories contradictory, loops of the planes hitting the towers only just ready for recycling. The attacks were already being transformed into “the World Trade Center Disaster,” not yet the ahistorical singularity of the emergency “nine one one.” Stranded, I had to spend the night in New Jersey at my boss’s house, reminded again of the boundless generosity of Americans to relative strangers. In an effort to protect his young son from the as yet unfiltered images saturating cable and Internet, my friend’s TV set was turned off and we did our best to reassure. We listened surreptitiously to news bulletins on AM radio, hoping that the roads would open. Walking the dog with my friend’s wife and son we crossed a park on the ridge on which Upper Montclair sits. Ten miles away a huge column of smoke was rising from lower Manhattan, where the stunning absence of the towers was clearly visible. The summer evening was unnervingly still. We kicked a soccer ball around on the front lawn and a woman walked distracted by, shocked and pale up the tree-lined suburban street, suffering her own wordless trauma. I remembered that though most of my students were ordinary working people, Montclair is a well-off dormitory for the financial sector and high rises of Wall Street and Midtown. For the time being, this was a white-collar disaster. I slept a short night in my friend’s house, waking to hope I had dreamed it all, and took the commuter train in with shell-shocked bankers and corporate types. All men, all looking nervously across the river toward glimpses of the Manhattan skyline as the train neared Hoboken. “I can’t believe they’re making us go in,” one guy had repeated on the station platform. He had watched the attacks from his office in Midtown, “The whole thing.” Inside the train we all sat in silence. Up from the PATH train station on 9th street I came onto a carless 6th Avenue. At 14th street barricades now sealed off downtown from the rest of the world. I walked down the middle of the avenue to a newspaper stand; the Indian proprietor shrugged “No deliveries below 14th.” I had not realized that the closer to the disaster you came, the less information would be available. Except, I assumed, for the evidence of my senses. But at 8 am the Village was eerily still, few people about, nothing in the sky, including the twin towers. I walked to Houston Street, which was full of trucks and police vehicles. Tractor trailers sat carrying concrete barriers. Below Houston, each street into Soho was barricaded and manned by huddles of cops. I had walked effortlessly up into the “lockdown,” but this was the “frozen zone.” There was no going further south towards the towers. I walked the few blocks home, found my wife sleeping, and climbed into bed, still in my clothes from the day before. “Your heart is racing,” she said. I realized that I hadn’t known if I would get back, and now I never wanted to leave again; it was still only eight thirty am. Lying there, I felt the terrible wonder of a distant bystander for the first-hand witness. Ana’s face couldn’t tell me what she had seen. I felt I needed to know more, to see and understand. Even though I knew the effort was useless: I could never bridge that gap that had trapped me ten miles away, my back turned to the unfolding disaster. The television was useless: we don’t have cable, and the mast on top of the North Tower, which Ana had watched fall, had relayed all the network channels. I knew I had to go down and see the wreckage. Later I would realize how lucky I had been not to suffer from “disaster envy.” Unbelievably, in retrospect, I commuted into work the second day after the attack, dogged by the same unnerving sensation that I would not get back—to the wounded, humbled former center of the world. My students were uneasy, all talked out. I was a novelty, a New Yorker living in the Village a mile from the towers, but I was forty-eight hours late. Out of place in both places. I felt torn up, but not angry. Back in the city at night, people were eating and drinking with a vengeance, the air filled with acrid sicklysweet smoke from the burning wreckage. Eyes stang and nose ran with a bitter acrid taste. Who knows what we’re breathing in, we joked nervously. A friend’s wife had fallen out with him for refusing to wear a protective mask in the house. He shrugged a wordlessly reassuring smile. What could any of us do? I walked with Ana down to the top of West Broadway from where the towers had commanded the skyline over SoHo; downtown dense smoke blocked the view to the disaster. A crowd of onlookers pushed up against the barricades all day, some weeping, others gawping. A tall guy was filming the grieving faces with a video camera, which was somehow the worst thing of all, the first sign of the disaster tourism that was already mushrooming downtown. Across the street an Asian artist sat painting the street scene in streaky black and white; he had scrubbed out two white columns where the towers would have been. “That’s the first thing I’ve seen that’s made me feel any better,” Ana said. We thanked him, but he shrugged blankly, still in shock I supposed. On the Friday, the clampdown. I watched the Mayor and Police Chief hold a press conference in which they angrily told the stream of volunteers to “ground zero” that they weren’t needed. “We can handle this ourselves. We thank you. But we don’t need your help,” Commissioner Kerik said. After the free-for-all of the first couple of days, with its amazing spontaneities and common gestures of goodwill, the clampdown was going into effect. I decided to go down to Canal Street and see if it was true that no one was welcome anymore. So many paths through the city were blocked now. “Lock down, frozen zone, war zone, the site, combat zone, ground zero, state troopers, secured perimeter, national guard, humvees, family center”: a disturbing new vocabulary that seemed to stamp the logic of Giuliani’s sanitized and over-policed Manhattan onto the wounded hulk of the city. The Mayor had been magnificent in the heat of the crisis; Churchillian, many were saying—and indeed, Giuliani quickly appeared on the cover of Cigar Afficionado, complete with wing collar and the misquotation from Kipling, “Captain Courageous.” Churchill had not believed in peacetime politics either, and he never got over losing his empire. Now the regime of command and control over New York’s citizens and its economy was being stabilized and reimposed. The sealed-off, disfigured, and newly militarized spaces of the New York through which I have always loved to wander at all hours seemed to have been put beyond reach for the duration. And, in the new post-“9/11” post-history, the duration could last forever. The violence of the attacks seemed to have elicited a heavy-handed official reaction that sought to contain and constrict the best qualities of New York. I felt more anger at the clampdown than I did at the demolition of the towers. I knew this was unreasonable, but I feared the reaction, the spread of the racial harassment and racial profiling that I had already heard of from my students in New Jersey. This militarizing of the urban landscape seemed to negate the sprawling, freewheeling, boundless largesse and tolerance on which New York had complacently claimed a monopoly. For many the towers stood for that as well, not just as the monumental outposts of global finance that had been attacked. Could the American flag mean something different? For a few days, perhaps—on the helmets of firemen and construction workers. But not for long. On the Saturday, I found an unmanned barricade way east along Canal Street and rode my bike past throngs of Chinatown residents, by the Federal jail block where prisoners from the first World Trade Center bombing were still being held. I headed south and west towards Tribeca; below the barricades in the frozen zone, you could roam freely, the cops and soldiers assuming you belonged there. I felt uneasy, doubting my own motives for being there, feeling the blood drain from my head in the same numbing shock I’d felt every time I headed downtown towards the site. I looped towards Greenwich Avenue, passing an abandoned bank full of emergency supplies and boxes of protective masks. Crushed cars still smeared with pulverized concrete and encrusted with paperwork strewn by the blast sat on the street near the disabled telephone exchange. On one side of the avenue stood a horde of onlookers, on the other television crews, all looking two blocks south towards a colossal pile of twisted and smoking steel, seven stories high. We were told to stay off the street by long-suffering national guardsmen and women with southern accents, kids. Nothing happening, just the aftermath. The TV crews were interviewing worn-out, dust-covered volunteers and firemen who sat quietly leaning against the railings of a park filled with scraps of paper. Out on the West Side highway, a high-tech truck was offering free cellular phone calls. The six lanes by the river were full of construction machinery and military vehicles. Ambulances rolled slowly uptown, bodies inside? I locked my bike redundantly to a lamppost and crossed under the hostile gaze of plainclothes police to another media encampment. On the path by the river, two camera crews were complaining bitterly in the heat. “After five days of this I’ve had enough.” They weren’t talking about the trauma, bodies, or the wreckage, but censorship. “Any blue light special gets to roll right down there, but they see your press pass and it’s get outta here. I’ve had enough.” I fronted out the surly cops and ducked under the tape onto the path, walking onto a Pier on which we’d spent many lazy afternoons watching the river at sunset. Dust everywhere, police boats docked and waiting, a crane ominously dredging mud into a barge. I walked back past the camera operators onto the highway and walked up to an interview in process. Perfectly composed, a fire chief and his crew from some small town in upstate New York were politely declining to give details about what they’d seen at “ground zero.” The men’s faces were dust streaked, their eyes slightly dazed with the shock of a horror previously unimaginable to most Americans. They were here to help the best they could, now they’d done as much as anyone could. “It’s time for us to go home.” The chief was eloquent, almost rehearsed in his precision. It was like a Magnum press photo. But he was refusing to cooperate with the media’s obsessive emotionalism. I walked down the highway, joining construction workers, volunteers, police, and firemen in their hundreds at Chambers Street. No one paid me any attention; it was absurd. I joined several other watchers on the stairs by Stuyvesant High School, which was now the headquarters for the recovery crews. Just two or three blocks away, the huge jagged teeth of the towers’ beautiful tracery lurched out onto the highway above huge mounds of debris. The TV images of the shattered scene made sense as I placed them into what was left of a familiar Sunday afternoon geography of bike rides and walks by the river, picnics in the park lying on the grass and gazing up at the infinite solidity of the towers. Demolished. It was breathtaking. If “they” could do that, they could do anything. Across the street at tables military policeman were checking credentials of the milling volunteers and issuing the pink and orange tags that gave access to ground zero. Without warning, there was a sudden stampede running full pelt up from the disaster site, men and women in fatigues, burly construction workers, firemen in bunker gear. I ran a few yards then stopped. Other people milled around idly, ignoring the panic, smoking and talking in low voices. It was a mainly white, blue-collar scene. All these men wearing flags and carrying crowbars and flashlights. In their company, the intolerance and rage I associated with flags and construction sites was nowhere to be seen. They were dealing with a torn and twisted otherness that dwarfed machismo or bigotry. I talked to a moustachioed, pony-tailed construction worker who’d hitched a ride from the mid-west to “come and help out.” He was staying at the Y, he said, it was kind of rough. “Have you been down there?” he asked, pointing towards the wreckage. “You’re British, you weren’t in World War Two were you?” I replied in the negative. “It’s worse ’n that. I went down last night and you can’t imagine it. You don’t want to see it if you don’t have to.” Did I know any welcoming ladies? he asked. The Y was kind of tough. When I saw TV images of President Bush speaking to the recovery crews and steelworkers at “ground zero” a couple of days later, shouting through a bullhorn to chants of “USA, USA” I knew nothing had changed. New York’s suffering was subject to a second hijacking by the brokers of national unity. New York had never been America, and now its terrible human loss and its great humanity were redesignated in the name of the nation, of the coming war. The signs without a referent were being forcibly appropriated, locked into an impoverished patriotic framework, interpreted for “us” by a compliant media and an opportunistic regime eager to reign in civil liberties, to unloose its war machine and tighten its grip on the Muslim world. That day, drawn to the river again, I had watched F18 fighter jets flying patterns over Manhattan as Bush’s helicopters came in across the river. Otherwise empty of air traffic, “our” skies were being torn up by the military jets: it was somehow the worst sight yet, worse than the wreckage or the bands of disaster tourists on Canal Street, a sign of further violence yet to come. There was a carrier out there beyond New York harbor, there to protect us: the bruising, blustering city once open to all comers. That felt worst of all. In the intervening weeks, we have seen other, more unstable ways of interpreting the signs of September 11 and its aftermath. Many have circulated on the Internet, past the blockages and blockades placed on urban spaces and intellectual life. Karl-Heinz Stockhausen’s work was banished (at least temporarily) from the canon of avant-garde electronic music when he described the attack on las torres gemelas as akin to a work of art. If Jacques Derrida had described it as an act of deconstruction (turning technological modernity literally in on itself), or Jean Baudrillard had announced that the event was so thick with mediation it had not truly taken place, something similar would have happened to them (and still may). This is because, as Don DeLillo so eloquently put it in implicit reaction to the plaintive cry “Why do they hate us?”: “it is the power of American culture to penetrate every wall, home, life and mind”—whether via military action or cultural iconography. All these positions are correct, however grisly and annoying they may be. What GK Chesterton called the “flints and tiles” of nineteenth-century European urban existence were rent asunder like so many victims of high-altitude US bombing raids. As a First-World disaster, it became knowable as the first-ever US “ground zero” such precisely through the high premium immediately set on the lives of Manhattan residents and the rarefied discussion of how to commemorate the high-altitude towers. When, a few weeks later, an American Airlines plane crashed on take-off from Queens, that borough was left open to all comers. Manhattan was locked down, flown over by “friendly” bombers. In stark contrast to the open if desperate faces on the street of 11 September, people went about their business with heads bowed even lower than is customary. Contradictory deconstructions and valuations of Manhattan lives mean that September 11 will live in infamy and hyper-knowability. The vengeful United States government and population continue on their way. Local residents must ponder insurance claims, real-estate values, children’s terrors, and their own roles in something beyond their ken. New York had been forced beyond being the center of the financial world. It had become a military target, a place that was receiving as well as dispatching the slings and arrows of global fortune. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Deer, Patrick and Miller, Toby. "A Day That Will Live In … ?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.1 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/adaythat.php>. Chicago Style Deer, Patrick and Miller, Toby, "A Day That Will Live In … ?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 1 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/adaythat.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Deer, Patrick and Miller, Toby. (2002) A Day That Will Live In … ?. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(1). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/adaythat.php> ([your date of access]).

In questo elaborato si propone un censimento e un'analisi del recente scenario delle orchestre multietniche in alcuni paesi dell'Europa meridionale. In particolare la rilevazione ha privilegiato gli esiti concernenti l'Italia e il Portogallo, considerando queste due aree come utile riferimento comparativo. La narrazione deriva da una ricognizione panoramica dei fenomeni migratori transnazionali contemporanei e dall'analisi delle pratiche sociali a favore dell'accoglienza e dell'integrazione delle comunità straniere nei nuovi territori di approdo. Questi determinati contesti socio-culturali hanno promosso e agevolato la costruzione di orchestre, cori e bande multietniche, considerate come una sorta di "operazione" per facilitare i delicati processi di integrazione delle comunità migranti nel tessuto locale e per valorizzare le diversità cultuali che caratterizzano le città contemporanee. Si seguono dunque gli esiti e gli sviluppi in itinere delle orchestre multietniche attive in Italia e in Portogallo, e di alcune esperienze recentemente concluse, ponendo particolare attenzione al pensare e al fare dei musicisti, alle pratiche performative in atto e alle trasformazioni musicali occorse nei nuovi contesti di migrazione. Si vuol dimostrare, infine, come questo tipo di accostamento possa aprire la strada ad un incontro tra culture differenti, che assume i connotati di un confronto e di uno scambio tra diverse dimensioni che mirano al riconoscimento e alla ricostruzione della propria identità musicale: un incontro che sul territorio porta con sé nuove e complesse sfide di inclusione, cittadinanza e lo sviluppo di una convivenza pacifica. This work offers a census and an analysis of the recent scene of multi-ethnic orchestras in some countries of southern Europe. The collection of data focused in particular on the outcomes concerning Italy and Portugal, taking these two areas as a useful comparative reference point. The narrative stems from a panoramic exploration of contemporary transnational migration events and from the analysis of social practices favouring reception and integration of foreign communities in the regions which are their landing place. These given socio-cultural contexts fostered and facilitated the construction of orchestras, choirs and multi-ethnic bands, envisioned as a sort of "operation" to ease the delicate processes of integration of migrant communities in the local social fabric and to acknowledge the value of cultural differences that are typical of contemporary cities. Thus, the results and the underway development of multi-ethnic orchestras active in Italy and in Portugal, and of some recently concluded experiences, were monitored, paying attention in particular to musicians' thinking and doing, to ongoing performative practices and to musical transformations which occurred in the new contexts of migration. Eventually, the aim is to show how this kind of convergence can pave the way for a meeting between different cultures, taking the form of reciprocal comparison and exchange between different dimensions that aim at the recognition and reconstruction of their musical identity: a meeting that brings with it in each area new and complex challenges of inclusion, citizenship and peaceful coexistence and development.

Part II (Houses) is a cultural mapping of the spaces where immigrants live/d, that is, residential buildings that have been or are intrinsically linked to the migration experiences from/to Italy as well as so-called ethnic neighborhoods. The Aperture that opens this part focuses on an area of Rome, Piazza Vittorio, which has come to represent the immigrant hub of the capital. It explores the square—a quintessential Italian space—both for its role in nation building and for its several layers of immigrant occupation. Through the analysis of Agostino Ferrente’s 2006 documusical The Orchestra di Piazza Vittorio, which recounts the creative project of forming a multi-ethnic orchestra in this piazza, the chapter highlights an interesting example of how preoccupations over the presence of immigrants can be substituted by new visions. In an area where the very meaning of “ethnic neighborhood” can be mapped at a trans-national level (multi-multi-ethnic) given the diversity of the immigrants’ origin, Ferrente’s documusical reflects a post-national scenario of cultural co-existence within an ethical vision that interestingly offers, especially in its final climax, a “success” story.